The question of what makes a quality leader is one that Bunmi Durowoju is on a quest to answer. Having spent more than two decades at Microsoft, she has been on a mission to not only own her own journey but also help early and mid-career professionals break new ground.
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A leader in her own right, Durowoju was a senior business development manager at Microsoft and led strategic engagements across industry verticals AgriTech, automotive, SpaceTech and green energy — winning awards for her efforts, including being recognised by the Financial Times as one of the Top 100 Black Leaders in Technology 2019 and led the team that won DE&I in Tech Awards’ Diversity Initiative of the Year, 2023 for the Microsoft TechHer Programme.
Her approach to leadership is refreshingly grounded in reality: “It's about stopping and smelling the roses at each point and stage of where I've been and what I've been doing,” she reflected.
This philosophy has guided her through roles that required breaking new ground — from introducing North American products into sceptical European markets to pioneering blockchain applications in agriculture.
What sets Durowoju apart is her understanding that leadership isn't just about climbing corporate ladders — it's about recognising the full complexity of the journey. She spoke candidly about the “underlying stream of movement that you either fit or don't fit in,” acknowledging the often unspoken realities of career advancement.
This honest approach extends to her view on technological leadership, particularly in emerging fields like AI, where she emphasises the importance of looking beyond the hype to understand deeper implications.
As a self-described “chaos coordinator,” Durowoju's leadership style is about making sense of complexity while maintaining “a keen empathetic understanding of how stakeholders are being affected and subsequently how they should be engaged with.”
Her experience in market-making and technology adoption has taught her that true leadership means being willing to enter uncharted territories while remaining mindful of potential impacts. “We are taking technology into virgin territories,” she noted. “How are we doing that with a timely level of protection that only the creators can provide?”
This sense of responsibility has shaped her current focus on advisory roles, where she aims to help organisations navigate technological transformation with both commercial success and ethical consideration in mind.
Her vision of leadership extends beyond individual achievement to include mentoring, guiding and being visible to the next generation of leaders, particularly those early in their careers who are making crucial decisions about their professional paths.
Leadership, for Durowoju, is deeply personal. Having navigated the tech industry as a Black woman, her mission extends beyond corporate success to helping to smooth the way for those she encounters who are operating in this inevitable rapidly changing world.
“I needed to step up and demonstrate what things should look like,” she explained, reflecting on her decision to join Microsoft's women's ERG (employee resource group), “so that my daughter, who's chosen a career in IT, doesn't have to experience or was at least trained and supported to handle some of the things I experienced.”
This generational perspective led her to question not just what leadership means, but who bears the burden of transformation in the tech industry.
“I query whether it should be me, a Black woman trying to find her career, also having to show leadership, also having to educate, also having to be maybe the recipient of bad behaviour,” she said. It's a striking moment of frankness that cuts to the heart of leadership challenges in tech — the often unspoken additional responsibilities placed on underrepresented leaders.
Her experience has shaped a clear vision of what genuine leadership should look like. The best leaders she's encountered bring “real pieces of honesty and worldliness” to their roles.
It's not just about making decisions or holding a title, which she likened to a yellow smiley face badge in that anyone can pick up or randomly be presented with and adorn — but bringing genuine understanding and global perspective and a desire to make everyone thrive in the role.
Authentic leadership, according to Durowoju, goes beyond making superficial declarations of diversity. It involves demonstrating genuine understanding and creating meaningful change by amplifying the voices of those who may not feel brave enough to speak up or who haven't been allowed to do so.
“The idea of having to be courageous in doing or saying the right thing, something that may not be self-serving, is going to be very important for a leader now, and the leaders for the future as well.
“A leader in the current environment needs to be able to understand the ability to speak up, provide oxygen and be prepared to hold our peers and seniors to account on behalf of the younger generations.”
It’s not simply a case of standing up and making demands of those in leadership, though, as Durowoju outlined there’s a right way and a wrong way to being an advocate on behalf of colleagues, and in her view, helps set the true leaders apart from the mere badge wearers.
“Being an advocate, a leader advocate, a management or manager advocate, if you're not prepared to advocate for your team, I don't believe that you get that badge. I will give you that badge not because you've already got the position, but because you’ve bought other people up, and in your position, you have shown others how to do the right thing.”
There’s one leader Durowoju expressed adoration and the utmost respect for: Satya Nadella the Indian-born American chair and CEO of Microsoft.
“I was intrigued watching Nadella when he first came on board, but I also heard others make derogatory statements about him, saying ‘let's see how long this guy lasts.’”
Unlike these individuals, however, Durowoju said it was Nadella’s fresh, unsullied belief in “good” coupled with an awareness of human nature and how it plays out in the corporate environment that resonated with her.
“He’s a wonderful example of a leader whose unique approach influenced and trickled down to the entire company resulting in one of the most significant financial and cultural turnarounds of the juggernaut that is Microsoft in recent times.”
But a leader doesn’t have to be a CEO, and certainly not someone as high-profile as Satya Nadella, either, as Durowoju suggested: “A good leader may have been someone below you, parallel to you, not even connected to your work at all. But they've done something, said something, been something that has made you bang, just go to the next level.”
Her thoughts cut to the heart of what it means to be a powerful leader — the kind that transcends titles and organisational hierarchies – one that makes great things happen.
Having operated often in this space herself, Durowoju posed a provocative question: "Have I been a fake leader because you didn't give me a badge? Or did you feel my positive energy when I walked into the room? Have I been genuine and true to me and you? Am I the person who has enabled you to achieve what you want to achieve and push that extra mile?"
It's a perspective that strips away the corporate veneer often associated with leadership, challenging the notion that true leadership is measured by titles like CVP or CEO.
Instead, Durowoju suggested a more meaningful metric: the impact we have on others' growth and success. “Are we putting too much around this word," she asked, “and not focusing enough on what it is that me, being me, impacts you, to make you fabulous?”
